We stayed in the old family home of a boutique champagne house, Cattier Champagne, in the small village of Rilly la Montagne, near Reims. Even villages the size of this one (which took around 20 minutes to circumnavigate on foot) had signs for champagne makers and growers on every corner. If you think you see a lot of vines driving around Hawke's Bay or Marlborough, Champagne will blow you away. Every square centimetre than can be used for growing grapes to make champagne is used. There are vines everywhere.
There are a number of regulations governing the making of Champagne, and some of these rules mean growers can't plant grapes willy-nilly and sell them to be used to make champagne. So you do see a few fields used for growing cereal crops, however it seems that many makers are keen for these crops to be even fewer in number. Some of the other regulations in the Champagne region inlcude harvesting only by hand, and the grading of grapes.
Once grapes are harvested, they are pressed and the juice is bottled with yeast and sugar and the first phase of fermentation begins - the process of making champagne is slighty different to still wine and involves two fermentation stages.
As the bottles near the end of the first phase of fermentation they are rotated and turned up side down to shift the sediment (the remnants of the yeast) to the neck of the bottle, a process known as 'riddling'.
The next step is disgorging, where the neck of the bottle is placed into ice for around ten minutes to freeze the sediment. The cap is whipped off, and the frozen sediment comes out.
At this stage the wine is just a still wine, the magical bubbles are yet to appear. More yeast is added to create bubbles, and winemakers may also add what's known as 'dosage' at this stage. This is a small amount of wine liquor, used to tweak the style of the wine. Some wines are made as non-dosage wines, which to me seems rather brave - with these wines you get what's in the bottle at the beginning and there is no chance to modify it by adding wine liquor. Next, the bottles are labeled and corked, and depending on whether the champagne is a vintage or not, it will be left for a second fermentation for a few months, and this is where the bubbles turn wine into champagne.
We visited a range of champagne houses, from renowned Veuve Clicquot - a house whose namesake, Madame Clicquot, was responsible for developing the 'riddling' technique that has become a crucial part of making champagne today - to Laurent Perrier, and smaller boutique houses such as Cattier, Tarlant and Mailly.Our first cellar and tasting visit was with our hosts, Cattier Champagne. Our first introduction to champagne cellars left me thinking that cellars in the Champagne region are a bit like rabbit warrens - there must be hundreds of kilometres of cellars underneath all the houses and roads in the region.
The cellars themselves have chalky walls, and maintain a constant temperature of around 10 degrees and almost 100% humidity - the ideal environment for nurturing champagne.
Cattier's cellars included an area reserved for their stunningly packaged bottles of Armand de Brignac. The bottles are entirely clad in gold or silver, and look hip-hop enough for Jay-Z to feature in his 'Show me what you got' video a couple of years back.
A room full of gold and silver champagne bottles is surprisingly giddying! Probably just as well we didn't linger in there too long...
Later, we sampled Cattier's non-vintage champagne, the 2002 vintage and the blanc de blanc champagne. Non-vintage champagnes are those that contain grapes from more than one year, and do not have a year printed on the label. Vintage champagnes are not generally made each year, but are produced when the winemaker feels the harvest that year has been exceptionally good.
Cattier's Blanc de blanc is made up of purely chardonnay grapes, and does not include the other two varieties of pinot noir and pinot meunier grapes that are used to make champagne. The latter was one of the favourites of all the champagnes we tried - fresh and crisp, and to use a completely non-wine writer-ish term - just plain yum!
Next on Kristina's adventures: the lunch to end all lunches...
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